This invention relates generally to electronic mail systems, and more particularly to electronic mail systems implemented with personal computers.
Personal computers were originally designed as stand-alone, desktop systems. As such, single users used their personal computers to run application programs such as word processors, spreadsheets, database managers, etc. Communications between a personal computer and other computer systems was largely limited to the physical transfer of data stored on a magnetic medium, such as a floppy disk or magnetic tape.
As personal computers became more widespread, there was an increasing demand for direct data communication between two or more computers. The use of modems to allow inter-computer communications became common. In addition, there was a rapid development of personal computer network technology during the 1980's.
As the number of direct communication channels between personal computers increased, electronic mail systems proliferated. With an electronic mail ("e-mail") system, a computer user can create a message in the form of electronic "mail" and can send it using another user's electronic "address". Recipients of e-mail can retrieve their electronic mail from their electronic "mailboxes" and, if desired, respond to or forward the message to other users.
E-mail systems tend to work quite smoothly if only a single mail system is used on a particular personal computer. However, things begin to get more complicated if the personal computer system supports a number of e-mail systems. For example, a personal computer can be coupled to a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), a mainframe computer, and to other computerized systems over telephone lines via modems. In such situations, multiple e-mail systems are likely to be available which requires users to periodically manually check each of their e-mail systems to see if they have any messages.
As an example, users might subscribe to multiple e-mail systems, such as America On Line (AOL), CompuServe, the Internet, on-line banking services, etc. Any one or more of these e-mail systems might be holding mail for a user at a particular time. Therefore, users must remember to check each of these e-mail systems on a periodic basis to determine of they have any mail. This can be a time consuming task if the user is a subscriber to a number of mail systems. Furthermore, if users forget to periodically check for mail with each of their services, it is possible that important mail may remain unread for a long period of time. This can be especially problematical if the sender of the e-mail erroneously assumes that the user frequently checks their mail box and, therefore, has received and acted on the e-mail.
There are some e-mail systems which permit the automatic retrieval of messages or mail. For example, software provided by America On Line can be configured to cause a personal computer system to automatically connect (via modem) with AOL computers on a periodic basis to check for mail. Also, StarNine Technology, Inc. of Berkeley, Calif. provides software called MaiLink Remote.TM. for QuickMail.TM. which works with QuickMail e-mail software made by CE Software of West Des Moines, Iowa to periodically dial-in (via modem) to the Internet to check for Internet e-mail. The Internet e-mail can then be delivered to individual users via the QuickMail e-mail system.
The prior art systems for automatically checking for e-mail suffer from a variety of drawbacks. For one, the software (referred to herein as "accessor" software) is typically custom-designed for each e-mail system. This tends to be expensive and inflexible. Also, prior art systems do not provide a method or apparatus for monitoring multiple e-mail systems, and for collecting, storing, and displaying e-mail information concerning the multiple systems in a consolidated and usable fashion. Because of these limitations, users have heretofore been forced to either manually check each E-Mail system on a periodic basis, or been subjected to multiple, independent, inconsistent, and possibly conflicting automated retrieval systems.